Kingdom Come: Deliverance offers dungeons without the dragons to Kickstarter

Over the years that we’ve been reporting on Kickstarter projects, the quality of the pre-alpha footage in the pitch videos has shot from barely-there wireframes to AAA-quality cinematics. Falling into the latter category is Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a realistic medieval RPG built on the CryEngine from the chaps behind Mafia, Crysis 3, and Forza Horizon.

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Kingdom Come looks so delicious because it’s already had a cash injection of 1.5 million dollars from a private investor. It was to be a project developed in a more traditional manner, but things like marketing started to get in the way, and the game’s investor started to get cold feet. Lead developer Dan Vavra found his small newfound company Warhorse at a crossroads; either find support for the game to prove to the investor that Kingdom Come would make it, or give up and go make an iPad MMO. Thanks to Kickstarter, Kingdom Come is going ahead. In just a few days, it’s shot past it’s £300,000 goal.

So with the game on the track to a real future, what can backers expect to get? Essentially it’s Universalis Europa as an open world RPG, with combat ripped from Chivalry and polished up like a prized blade. Throwing dragons and magic in the gutter, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a gritty, realistic depiction of the Middle Ages, with massive battles, castle sieges, and a non-linear, multiple path questing system. And horse riding. You can ride a horse at a man and skewer him on the end of a longsword.

Warhorse are a tiny team barely more than 30 strong, but with many decades of experience between them on some seriously impressive titles. Their plans for Kingdom Come are ambitious, super publisher-unfriendly, and nothing short of intriguing. If it all comes to fruitition, the game will release in three episodes at the end of 2015, offering up 70 hours of RPG action. With their goal met it’s guaranteed – provided nothing goes wrong – to happen, so you could wait for that date to see it appear on Steam. If you’d rather get early access and help fund development through, the Kickstarter campaign continues until February 20th.